Intel unveils new software weapon for 'Big Data'

SAN FRANCISCO -- Intel (INTC) launched a new software platform for number-crunching on a massive scale, its latest offering in a growing field that it hopes will boost sales of its powerful server chips.

The Santa Clara-based chipmaker is one of a growing number of technology companies that want to help organizations find value in "Big Data" -- the analysis of vast troves of information that can be culled from social media, Web searches, financial records, and other mountains of digital facts and figures.

Showgoers visit the Intel booth on the first day of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas January 8, 2013. REUTERS/Rick Wilking (RICK WILKING)

Intel unveiled its third customized version of Hadoop, the open-source software that aggregates results from large sets of data and is widely used in Big Data analysis.

Intel's tweaks to Hadoop optimize it to work better with solid-state drives as well as other improvements, Boyd Davis, vice president of Intel's architecture group and general manager of the datacenter software division, said at a news event on Tuesday.

Intel hopes that developing software to encourage more companies to leap into Big Data analysis will lead to higher sales of its high-end Xeon server processors.